#I haven't written drama meta in so long

[notedchampagne]

Trick or Treat! I haven't read tlt yet, and I'm sure I would like it, but my pet peeve is that most of the "synopses" I see are basically just "lesbian necromancers in space!" and even the back of the book that I've seen just doesn't give me much of an idea of the plot? I'm sure I would like it, but it's hard to know what it's actually About 😔

treat. thats a similar gripe i have as well! i think its good for attracting an audience but it doesnt do much to get them hooked aside from "it has lesbians in it". if you want to get a genuine tlt fic rec from me i wrote this in goodreads. yes sorry i started a goodreads i just needed to keep track of what books i read:

the locked tomb series is about the horrors of love, the tragedy of relationships beyond romance, why codependency is not as fun as you think, the joy of sacrifices, how imperialism affects culture affects people affects imperialism, and most importantly: the humor of not knowing what the fuck is going on. i PROMISE you that tamsyn ties all of these together perfectly.

gideon the ninth is about the intimacy of hating someone youve known your whole life, the all-consuming desire to make something out of yourself and how it can destroy you if youre not careful, how no man is an island, and how you are not immune to propaganda. it is also a murder mystery. i ALSO promise tamsyn writes this all in efficiently.

throughout the series, muir's gimmick is choosing the person least equipped to narrate objectively: the points of view are opinionated, ignorant, humorous, and challenging to get through if you're someone that asks "can this PLEASE be explained now??" she sets up dominoes in seemingly random places at random times, and then knocks it all over in a beautiful cascade of information that makes you feel thrilled and sick. the series is incredibly rereadable from the layers of foreshadowing and theming between all three (soon to be four) books, but for your first run you HAVE to be patient. you HAVE to be willing to be entertained. the payoff of being invested in this series is glorious; it's red-string 'am i crazy' hype. i have a google doc listing off theme connections and details that i started for fun. the characters are MEAN, which i value with my life. gideon and harrowhark are 17 and 18 years old and they act like it: they're funny, theyre self-flagellating, theyre bitchy, theyre unreasonable, etc etc. every character flaw is consistent with their being.

my biggest gripes with the series is that the worldbuilding is too weak for what i can see it being and the memes can be a little niche. the setting and necromancy is moreso a tool for the characters, so theres a lot of beautiful tidbits and descriptions, but you're not going to get any rules or meta beyond surface-level aesthetics. personally, "lesbian necromancers in space" does not cut it for me. if you were raised catholic though, this book might strike a chord with you. if you were raised catholic AND you are a lesbian, youre the target audience. i hope you have fun YOU WILL LIKE THIS SERIES/BOOK IF YOU LIKE: tragedy, character juxtaposition, the teen butch struggle, the exploration of love and toxic dynamics, mystery, sci-fi written like a fantasy novel, catholic theming, death theming, enemies to lovers but worse, freaky white girls, dyke drama, lesbians that have problems bigger than dyke drama, swordfighting, character duos, morally gray characters YOU MIGHT NOT LIKE THIS BOOK/SERIES IF YOU DISLIKE: being confused, being left in the dark for too long, unreliable narrators, morally gray characters, loose/light worldbuilding

[fannish-karmiya]

An update, sort of?

It's been ages, years? since I've posted to my tumblr. It was a mixture of getting frustrated with fandom drama, and depression over my art and writing. It's easy to say I just haven't posted long enough to build up an audience, etc, but I've had a lot of failed starts on social media with my art over the past near-decade and the lack of traction has made me reach the point of an intense, deep depression. As ironic as it is, I almost resented that people like my fanfiction; why are people reading that, but no one is interested in the art and writing I'm actually passionate about?

I love MDZS, and I enjoyed writing fic for it, but I'm far more interested in writing original stories. If I think that Jin Guangyao's background is interesting (for all that he lets himself become a monster), or have my interest captured by some of the new dramas featuring eunuchs in more diverse roles than the traditional villainous roles, I'd rather sit down and write my own story about those themes, not just hop around between fandoms.

I always tried to reblog stuff from my artist-tumblr to this one, but it never really made any difference. Anything I posted about outside of fandom metas flopped. Some people seem to be able to endure this, but I just couldn't. It hurt deeply in a way that I can't explain; every time I tried to post anything to social media, or even logged on, I was filled with this gaping hole of dread.

I do still want to upload what I have written of my fanfics; anything which I've started posting is either complete or at least halfway. I may still pick those fics up and finish them, too. Who knows.

But overall I'm so much more interested in original writing and art. Writing fanfic for MDZS was a rare event for me, because I love that novel so much that I couldn't let it go after just finishing the novel/radiodrama/donghua.

I'm writing my own novels, and am trying to figure out what the hell to do with them (self-publishing seems most practical, but also dubious for someone who has no social media skills whatsoever). I also am experimenting with a website where I am able to make much more detailed posts about my interests, though it is still in early stages.

So far, this post is the one I'm most proud of, if anyone is interested. I am deeply fascinated by shoujo manga and its history, and wrote this post trying to chronicle how the iconic art style developed. It was a huge amount work to research, write, and lay out the visual examples for this post, and I'm incredibly proud of it.

I don't really know what to say or how to end this, so...there you are.

[serpentinegraphite]

...re: your tags on the WFA Jason crowbar incident -- might one be directed to your referenced essay?

Since it's been a min, here's the DC meta post this ask is referencing.

I thought it was on my blog, but I haven't been able to find the essay in the weeks since this ask came in? It might have been a tag rant more than the proper essay I thought I had posted. Or I might have been thinking of a broader and more general essay on the current trauma in fanfic portrayal, which I have definitely posted on this blog somewhere and in several friends' inboxes.

The gist of the essay is that a) fandom as a whole has a tendency to treat panic attacks/flashbacks as the Only and Right Way to experience trauma, even though that's by far not universal and b) will apply this even to characters who have canon trauma and show specific trauma reactions!

With Jason Todd in WFA having a Crowbar Sound Flashback, it's a perfect microcosm of both! The problem, therefore, isn't necessarily WFA being Uniquely Terrible and Inaccurate; WFA just exclusively plays with a lot of softball, fandom-popular tropes, so it remains popular even and especially with people who aren't super familiar with the canon. And because WFA thrives on softball, popular tropes, of course it's going to pick up on the Best Way To Write Trauma.

The essence of the problem is actually the way trauma symptoms in fanfic are homogenized to the most palatable, most sympathetic reaction guaranteed to woobify even the most hardened crime lords and war criminals: a panic attack. But not ANY panic attack! Specifically the hyperventilating on the floor, curled up in a ball kind of panic attacks! (Characters who lash out in anger when they're scared? Characters who shout mean things? Not anymore! Now they're hyperventilating on the floor and they need tender care and possibly a hug.) The momentary full helplessness is integral to creating a miniature h/c journey for the characters (panic –> helplessness –> rescue –> bonding).

Panic attacks actually have a pretty wide range of symptoms! Sometimes they're focused more on derealization reactions or heart racing (loads of people irl end up in the ER thinking they're having a heart attack, when it's actually a panic attack).

This specific portrayal of trauma as panic attacks is, I think, most egregious with characters who would actually fucking die if they had this exact trauma response. E.g., Jason Todd, who infamously both commits crimes and fights them. If he has a panic attack at every scum bag who waves a crow bar at him, he's probably getting beaten to death with a crowbar again. If even one of his regular criminal contacts or enemies catches wind that he has a crowbar panic attack weakness, he's dead! And this could be played for drama in this kind of fanfic, but it never is. (Because drama isn't the point, quick and dirty h/c is.)

Distilling his trauma about dying into panic attacks dismisses his entire history and canon trauma response (rage and vengeance and trying a completely different tactic from Batman to better the city of Gotham when the Red Hood is being a good guy and not just being a crime lord for profit). Here is a solid discussion on how Jason reacts to his own death (I'm new here and this essay is already long lol, I'm not citing whole comics runs or anything myself), with a great addendum from Ragnarok-hound in the tags on the Doylist reasons for why the canon goes over Jason's death again and again anyway.

The problem further stems from everyone learning panic attack symptoms from a combination of personal experience (which for the AO3 crowd in the shippy tags does not as often include people with uh combat or crime experience) and actual mental health web resources, so any panic attack scene reads like it was written by someone between high school and college age checking off a list of psych textbook panic attack symptoms. So it makes sense why they would go with the thing that is easiest to write for them and stick with the approved symptoms they know will garner the most sympathy from the audience and, importantly, other characters in the scene. E.g., to return to bullying WFA's portrayal, having Bruce arrive to tell Jason everything will be okay and fix everything.

(I think ymmv more on Bruce portrayals, depending on Your Preferred Batman, whether that's the corresponding era of comics with Red Hood, the animated series, or some campy/classic live action Batman portrayal, but one thing that is pretty consistent in every Batman media is that he's not fucking great at feelings, so even with a generous reading, WFA simplifies a lot of fraught history between Jason and Bruce here. Further, I could write an entire second essay on how bystanders in fanfic always have the perfect response, to either use the right therapy speak and handle a panic attack perfectly or hug the person to help them calm down or what have you, but this is long enough as it is. To be brief, though: sometimes, especially in a situation like Jason and Bruce's, it's perfectly normal to see someone panicking and then also panic and fuck things up even worse! It's also common to feel frustrated or tired of seeing someone panic over the same thing! Like I know fanfic and WFA are wish fulfillment, but like. There's a lot of nuance and basic trauma understanding missing here.)

And that brings us to another point, which is that PTSD triggers don't necessarily manifest as anxiety disorders and textbook panic attacks. I mean, this feels obvious, but there are a lot of ways to experience PTSD! and that's the thing about Jason Todd! He has trauma, not an anxiety disorder! While panic attacks as the default and most common trauma reaction are very common in fanfic, it's not like even the top most common trauma trigger reaction? And it's weird that it's everywhere like this. Trigger responses have a wiiiiide range, e.g., nightmares, lashing out (the Netflix Jessica Jones show was especially good at this actually! Billy Hargrove on Stranger Things is a fucking perfect example too), dissociation (The Raven Cycle books do a great job with this, and then the fanfic forgets that it happened entirely), or simply activating one's fight or flight instinct (and we've seen with Jason, it's often a fight instinct!). There are probably also loads of Batman comics exemplifying each of these variations, but a) as stated I'm new here, I don't have comprehensive citations for every character (yet) and b) I really want to illustrate how fanfic specifically keeps sticking to one particular portrayal in a way that most canons don't.

Jason Todd can be easily written as having a Specific Traumatic Incident (dying hideously via crowbar) or having complex PTSD (little daily bullshit! you can do an entire deep dive on complex PTSD resulting from poverty, homelessness, and regular repeated exposure to violence as a child e.g. by being Robin, which is not even getting into the stuff you can gather from popular hc/later retcons about his mom's drug use or how his dad's working for Two Face and getting sent to prison might have affected him; another example it's a common hc that he's straight edge because of what drugs may or may not have done to his mom depending on the canon you're working with, but I don't see a lot of people writing him with the corresponding control issues that often pair with that). There are a lot of options is what I'm saying.

WFA choosing to double down on the sound of a crowbar scraping (when also like he's the one using a crowbar for actual mechanic things in this scene, he's probably used to a variety of metal scraping sounds, okay I'm nitpicking here again) over any of the more complex trauma under his belt is very lazy writing. They're distilling his entire history to one specific sound that causes a very targeted panic response, which I know. Is the format. That's how WFA works, it's not supposed to be deep, but this is again, a pattern I keep seeing again and again in fanfiction (to bully another fandom: Stranger Things fans insisting that Steve Harrington is afraid of his own swimming pool when the canon strongly contradicts that; he's swim team captain for 3 years running after this AND that's actually Nancy's trauma reaction, not Steve's).

Again, the problem isn't necessarily specifically with WFA or people who enjoy it or with h/c. But, yeah, the crowbar scraping sounds panic attack is a huge disservice to Jason's character, and it's like a ubiquitous pattern of writing trauma in recent years.

[amethystina]

Hi! Do you think about making a analysis on the last episode of TDJ? (If you haven't done already) I just rewatched this ep the other day and I feel like no matter how many times I watch it, there will always be something that surprises me. Every episode does this to me actually.

Not the last episode as a whole, no, since that would probably make my brain explode xD Like, it's just too big? ANY episode would be too big considering the number of details, plot points, character moments etc. they contain. I wouldn't even know where to start analysing a full episode, at least not in the way I usually write my metas.

I'd need a narrower framework to build my analysis on, like a specific relationship, a specific scene, a specific plotline, a specific theory etc. Which is why my two more detailed metas so far are very contained with very clear goals. That's how much I have to narrow it down to be able to accurately convey something, because otherwise there would just be too much information for me to condense into something coherent. And I would have no idea in what order to present things. Not to mention that I'd be terrified of missing something important because the scope would be too big.

(I'm also just a terribly wordy person who can't write short things to save my life. Can you IMAGINE how long that analysis would be? x'D)

I obviously have a lot of details and ideas stored in my brain, but in order to convey them in a way that's actually digestible to other people, I need some sort of prompt or structure first. And, sometimes, that structure can actually be a fanfic. I'm not joking when I say that Who Holds the Devil is basically a gigantic meta at this point, because I'm pouring ALL of my thoughts and observations from the drama into it.

Which, in all honesty, if I had known that when I started? Then I probably wouldn't have written the fic x'D Because it's so, so daunting to go: "Alright, I'm going to summarize all my thoughts and feelings about this piece of media into this one work!" Granted that this one work is huge enough to fit A LOT of thoughts and feelings, but it's still a pretty insane endeavour.

Anyway! I'm sorry if that's a bit of a disappointing answer. I just don't think that my specific brand of analysis would be all that efficient on such a broad scale. I'm more of a detail-oriented person? So it would have to be something specific from the last episode, not the episode as a whole.

[lurkingshan]

Inspired by @waitmyturtles and @nieves-de-sugui, sharing my journey through BL! Putting this under a read more because I really found a lot of words on this topic. Feel free to skim at will - now that you got me going I have a lot to say!

First, a bit of background. Three big interests of mine really converged to make BL kind of a perfect storm for me:

Romance: I have been an avid consumer of romance stories as far as back as I can remember. When I was a kid I would read several books a week and before I even hit my tween years I always gravitated to the romance genre. Add in film and television and it's safe to say I haven't gone a week of my life without consuming some form of a story about two people falling in love. It is absolutely my shit.

Asian dramas: More recent but no less intense an obsession for me. I watched my first kdrama in 2019 - my favorite gossip blogger (shoutout to Lainey) was constantly posting about a drama on Netflix (It's Okay Not to Be Okay). So I decided to try it out and I instantly fell in love. Kdramas are written nearly exclusively by women, they respect romance as a genre, and they cater to female audiences. It was unlike anything I ever experienced watching Western media. I started watching them more frequently, then when the pandemic hit I found myself with a ton of time at home and a fun new focus issue, and watching dramas with subtitles was a huge help.

Fandom: Since I was a teen I was always kind of hopping in and around internet fandom. When I like something, I like to enjoy it with others and find community around shared interests. And when I'm frustrated with media, I really like to dig into that and explore ways to fix it, so I became an avid fanfic reader, as well. Fandom to fandom my level of involvement varied - sometimes I just lurk around fandom spaces, sometimes I actually develop a presence, and in one instance I even got deeply involved in a fandom community to the point where I was posting meta, writing fic, and leading fan activities.

ANYWAY, after that long preamble, I come to the point: Because I was so into kdramas, and had watched/read a lot of Western QL romances, when I saw Where Your Eyes Linger pop up on my Viki recommendations I clicked on it. I liked it, and immediately wanted to understand more about it, because it was the first kdrama I had ever seen with a same sex pairing, and the format was so different. So I did a bit of research, and that was the first time I ever heard of BL. I was a little mind blown - there's a whole genre of QL romances in Asia??? So of course I set out to find more. I did a general search and the first thing I found was 2gether. This was June of 2021, so it was already about a year following the initial frenzy of that show, but it was still hugely popular and there was fan content about it everywhere. So I journeyed to YouTube to watch it, and that was my introduction to Thai BL and the wider genre.

From there I started looking for guidance on what to watch, and because of my time in various fandoms tumblr was always a go-to place where I knew I could find other people watching whatever obscure thing I was into. I found @absolutebl quickly and started reading their history and analysis posts on the genre. That was when it really sunk in for me how much culture and history there was to dig into, and I was really intrigued by the different styles and industries of each country. So I started working my way through their lists of the top 10 BLs from each country and it all just kind of spiraled from there.

I will not go into detail about every show I watched, but a few highlights:

TharnType: This was the first high heat BL I ever saw, and because I came over from kdramas, the first high heat Asian show I had seen, period. This show is messy and the writing was a hilarious hodgepodge of strong character work alongside absurd plotting and what I came to learn was typical Mame problematic content, but the chemistry between the leads was off the charts. It really set the bar for me in that respect, and got me looking for other examples (which at that time were mostly from Taiwan).

Theory of Love: This one inspires mixed opinions in fandom, but for me it was the first time I realized a Thai BL could not only be fun, but also good (no disrespect to other early Thai BLs but... yeah lol). There was a coherent emotional narrative arc! Smart story structure! Believable character development and earned redemption! Good actors! This one set me on a path to find the good stuff.

I Told Sunset About You: Which led me to ITSAY, the drama that convinced me BL could also be high cinema and art. This show blew me way, honestly. And got me more interested in finding the other more cinematic entries in the genre, which I mostly found from Japan.

The Untamed: When I saw this one on the list for China, I was like wait why have I heard of that? The Untamed/Mo Dao Zu Shi is one of those fandoms that is so big and ubiquitous, anyone who spends time online will have heard of it long before they know what it actually is. This show opened up a bunch of new fixations for me - a new all-time fav character, an introduction to cdramas and the xianxia/wuxia genres, and the discovery of Chinese web novels. It's a very expansive universe with a lot going on outside the romance, unlike most BLs. Which I guess can be good or bad, depending on your perspective.

Bad Buddy + Semantic Error: These are the shows I credit for fully sucking me into the BL fandom on tumblr. Before BB aired, I was just kind of lurking about (it’s right there in the handle, fam) checking a few blogs periodically for recommendations and watching shows at my own pace. But BB and then SE caused such a frenzy that I decided to start watching them live and checking tumblr every week for reactions. I found more excellent blogs (like @bengiyo @negrowhat @laowen @liyazaki) that were posting not only BB and SE content but also commentary about other shows. Eventually I gave in and created a new tumblr account so I could actually follow them instead of going to their blogs on web browser like a weirdo, and my participation in fandom escalated predictably from there.

By early 2022 I had pretty much caught up on most of the history of the genre (though not everything - I refuse to watch Waterboyyy, I do have some standards) and developed a fairly solid understanding of the cultural context around it. I then started trying to keep up with new shows. As a cishet, it wasn’t the thrill of representation that drew me into the genre as much as the thrill of finding a genre that brought together so many of my favorite things, combined with the excitement of seeing the community grow and getting the chance to learn so much from the brilliant people who were watching these shows. Checking reactions to airing shows became a weekly habit, and my watchlist kept getting longer and longer. I learned about which platforms I should be watching on and where to direct my $$ to support the genre. And I heard about so many shows I never would have known existed without this community.

So that’s me! If you made it to the end of this post you are a true champion. Thanks for inviting the conversation @waitmyturtles - it was fun to reflect!

[mangoisms]

Hiii morning ask game time! I'm sending in multiple but you don't have to answer them all!

☁️ 🌷 🍧 please!

And 🐥🐥🐥🐥🐥🐥🐥🐥🐥🐥

hiiii froggy thank you 🫶🫶🫶🫶 i loveeeee ask games so i am super happy to answer all of these ❤️‍🩹❤️‍🩹❤️‍🩹

☁️ wip you want to write but haven't started yet

omg... it has to be eof... it's yet another dc comics fic, except it's tim drake/oc! basically the mc, leah, gets spider powers and has to learn how to navigate them with tim's 'help.' and the caveat there, of course, is that he is technically helping her but also monitoring her progress/development to make sure she isn't a threat to the city, as in specifically cataloguing information about her powers as a sort of contingency plan 'just in case' and she has no idea he's doing Any Of That because she thinks he's just helping her mostly out of the kindness of his own heart. but then they actually get to be friends!! but then he's wayyy past the point of no return and plus batman Does Not like meta-humans (what leah technically is now) in 'his' city and is disapproving of her going out there as a vigilante (technically aided by tim but batman Does Not know this) and its basically a whole mess of lies and it will definitely totally be fine when it all unravels (it will not).

(not technically spoilers either just 'cause you kinda go in knowing tim is not totally helping leah out of kindness but she doesn't know that; there's just so much drama and i think it's the fic i get to showcase tim's flaws the most which is so fun)

🌷 writing achievement you want to brag about

hm!!!! i don't actually know... i guess my hits on ao3? superposition is almost at 4k hits which is crazy. and frmb is at 2.5k which is also crazy. if not this maybe my total word count there???? its at. help. 450k 😭 since 2019...

🍧 weirdest place you've written

lets see i think the weirdest place i've written is maybe the drive-thru? if the line is particularly long i will whip out my phone and start writing LOL. i will write anywhere if given the chance as long as i have my phone 🫡

and thank you!!!! for the 🐥🐥🐥🐥🐥 i am sending that right back to you ❤️‍🩹❤️‍🩹❤️‍🩹❤️‍🩹

send me summertime writing asks!

[tilbageidanmark]

Movies I watched this week (#181):

“It’s a pity we haven’t got a bit of rope..”

Prompted by the HootsMaguire's essay, I was reminded that I’ve never seen Waiting for Godot (2001). Beckett's absurd play is so fantastically original. Two shabby fellows, confused, belligerent and forgetful, argue with each other for 2 solid hours, without making any sense or connection. Two other odd characters appear, a master and his slave, and then a laconic messenger boy. But everybody's memories are definitely defective, and they must repeat everything again and again - not that it helps. And the allusive Godot of course never appears. (Photo Above).

So what the heck does it all mean? I haven't got a clue, but it's mesmerizing. 9/10.

🍿

The 2 last parts of Abbas Kiarostami‘s ‘Koker Trilogy’:

🍿 I don't know why I waited so long to watch these two movies, since I loved his first entry 'Where Is the Friend's House?'.

And life goes on (Also called 'Life and nothing more') is a simple but clever semi-documentary meta-film. In 1990, a devastating earthquake killed 50,000 people in a remote Persian area. A filmmaker brings his son with him on a trip to the destroyed village which was the location of his previous film. They want to check if any of the kids from the first movie survived. Like most Iranian movies I've seen, the cars are old, barely moving jalopies, and the deafening noise from street traffic stands out as another character of the story. 8/10.

🍿 Through the Olive Trees Goes Meta one level up. It's a lovely continuation of the 2nd chapter, peeling a 'Day for night' onion of 'how it was filmed' in a primitive village settings. Recreating the memorable terrace scene and adding a maybe-true, maybe-fiction story of the boy and girl who played the newly-wed. Beautiful rendering with a sad, sad final shot that last for a long time, and doesn't offer clear explanations. And everything is permeated by death and destruction. 9/10.

🍿

2 documentaries by Todd Douglas Miller:

🍿 “… Houston. Tranquility Base here… The Eagle has landed…”

Apollo 11 is an exhilarating 2019 re-telling of the moon landing. Perfectly crisp and emotionally laid out, without any bullshit narration, talking heads interviews or irritating recreations. Just jaw-dropping photography which puts you in the middle of the action. And the display of massive technology is overwhelming: Thousands of engineers and scientists who had built such an inhuman infrastructure (and where each bolt and wire must work 100% of the time!) - 10/10.

On July 20, 1969, I was a 15-year old, arrogant prick, who refused to respond to anything that was shown on TV, so instead of watching the actual event 'live', I ignored it, taking a stroll in the night streets and pondering my miserable life. What an insufferable idiot I was! (And probably still is).

🍿 Miller's earlier docu-drama Dinosaur 13 however, was a huge let-down. A fascinating start about the South Dakotan paleontologists who unearthed the "Sue" skeleton, turned into a standard 'True Crime' melodrama. Full of dull reenactments, wall-to-wall musical score that tells you how to feel, boring interviews where the characters sit and emote while recalling every step of what happened, fill-in visuals, obvious narrative... Disappointing!

🍿

3 by Romanian Adrian & Claudia Silișteanu:

🍿 The Ditch (2012), a terrific rustic comedy about a peasant who has to dig a ditch in front of his house, and like Tom Sawyer, would rather hide in the barn and drink while letting somebody else do the labor. 8/10.

🍿 Written / Unwritten (2016) is another unexpected drama about unpredictable, ungovernable and very loud gypsies. A baby is born, and the nurse needs to fill out the correct paperwork in order to release her. Best film of the week!

🍿 The Afghanistans (2019) is very different. It starts with a soldier trying not to be shot, and develops into an intricate power play of government, bureaucracy, refugees and hard negotiations.

I would watch anything else these 2 will produce!

🍿

Raffaello Matarazzo was a successful Italian director, in the days before Neorealism. His Tourist Train (1933) is the first comedy from the Fascist era that I’ve seen. But it has no political elements. Just a lovely trip into the Umbrian countryside by a group of middle class people, and their light adventures by the river in Orvieto. Nino Rota’s first film score. 6/10.

🍿

Hollywood's depictions of the deep South X 3:

🍿 Rich Hall's The Dirty South, my first by comedian Rich Hall, a tongue-in-cheek documentary for the BBC, about how Southerners were portrayed through the years by the movies, from Li'l Abner and Rhett Butler to 'Your cheatin' heart' and Burt Reynolds. 'If you needed Hollywood to tell you about these musicians, then you're a grazer. Fuck you.'

Next on my list: His entries about American 'Road movies' and 'Westerns' genres. (Thanks to u/jupiterkansas.)

🍿 "What we've got here is failure to communicate."

Peak Paul Newman as Cool hand Luke, a rebel without a cause, another Randle McMurphy sentenced to an institute that will do everything it can to break his freewheeling spirit. Self-destructive, anti-social nihilist, sticking it to the Man, until he can no more. Good old Chain-gang romanticism, lays it thick: When he finished eating 50 hard-boiled eggs in one hour, he's left laying like a crucified Jesus on the table, a beautiful, bare-chested specimen. 💯 score on Rotten Tomatoes.

🍿 Baby Doll was another scandalous Tennessee Williams / Elia Kazan tale of unconsummated desire. Sweaty failures tearing each other down. A sexually-frustrated, boozy husband losing his gin-cotton business. A 19-year old virgin Lolita, who doesn't realize the effects she has on all men around her. Eli Wallace in his first role as a hot Sicilian lover-type, bent on revenge. Two black share-croppers acting as a Greek chorus. No wonder The Catholic Legion of Decency boycotted this 'filth'.

🍿

Unrelated, my first film by Joanna Hogg, which was also her debut feature. A British woman escapes some marital issues by staying with friends at a villa in Tuscany (which was nice). The film is highly-acclaimed, but I found the whole story dull and un-engaging. [*Female Director*]

🍿

"Never sweep the place where you live. Because after four years, the dirt doesn't get worse!"

An Evening with Quentin Crisp is my introduction to the controversial gay iconoclast, English raconteur and witty performer. The YouTube copy is of low-quality, but the content is 'Marvelous'.

Next: The two movies based on Crisp’s work, with John Hurt playing him, 'The naked civil servant' and 'An Englishman in New York'. (Also, a deep dive into John Hurt’s meatiest roles!).

🍿

Brat Pack X 2:

🍿 I haven't seen nearly any movies from the 'Brat Pack' universe, and wasn't vested in any of the actors' careers. So Andrew McCarthy's new autobiographical documentary, Brats, didn't carry any nostalgic resonance with me. It's also about the pervasiveness of pop culture television from the 80's, which was even less interesting. But his pained journey of discovery felt unexpectedly honest. He used this film as a form of personal therapy, which is Okay, I guess. I also didn't realize that this was the first time when Hollywood zoomed in its focus on teenagers and the young, and that these actors were elevated to carry the money torch. 7/10.

🍿 So I thought I'll try some of these '80s classics I had missed out on. Unfortunately, I started with Class (1983), which was Rob Lowe's 2nd film, as well as the debut of McCarthy, John Cusack, Virginia Madsen, and Lolita Davidovich. Badly-remake of 'The Graduate' with cringy prep school tropes was a second rate sex comedy. Couldn't finish it.

🍿

Roger Corman's horror-comedy Bucket of blood taking place in a late-'50s counterculture scene, where phony "Bohemians" and "Beatniks" and "Artists" are fawning over the busboy's macabre clay sculptures. "I love everything about Roger Corman except his films..."

🍿

A bunch of shorts from all over:

🍿 Rain Town, a beautiful, calming Japanese fairy tale about a little girl in a yellow raincoat. With the spirit and soul of Ghibli magic. 7/10.

🍿 How a bicycle is made, a short British Council How-To film from 1945. Impressively primitive.

🍿 Neighbours, my first by Canadian Norman McLaren. An anti-war stop-motion parable which won the Oscar in 1953. The Coen Brothers must have seen it before making 'A Serious Man'.

🍿 Daybreak Express, D. A. Pennebaker first film from 1953. Set to a Duke Ellington tune. Jazzy and poetic, nearly abstract. 7/10.

🍿 Dead End, another fantastically-nihilistic nightmare from Victoria Vincent about a depressed school counselor and even more desperate youngster. 9/10. [*Female Director*]

🍿 He starred in 200 movies, and many of them were 'Bad'. Still, he never won an Oscar. Now that The Don is gone, what should I watch in his memory? One of the great ones I've already seen ('Don't look now', '1900', 'Klute', 'Casanova', 'Invasion of the body snatchers') or one that I haven't ('The dirty dozen', 'Kelly's Heroes', 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 'Cold Mountain')?

So meanwhile, here's Cloudbusting, where he plays Orgonomist Wilhelm Reich and Kate Bush plays his son. [I like the song more when it was used at the climax of 'Palm Spring' though.] RIP, Donald Sutherland!

🍿 Look at life, George Lucas very first experimental film, made in 1965, while he was still a student at USC, and heavily influenced by Canadian Arthur Lipsett. Found at a new in-depth analysis of the Brainwashing Film within Film from Pakula's 'The Parallax View': A must-read for anybody who loves the 'Paranoia Trilogy'!

🍿The F-Word, A Father-Daughter Swearing Lesson, from The New Yorker. A riff on the old 'What The Fuck!' The English Language's Most Versatile Word.

🍿 The Letterboxd Oscars: Some guy edited a 32 min. YouTube video, comparing all the Best Movie Oscar Winners to the list of Letterbox highest-rated movies from each year. In 94 years, only 10 were the same for both. Obviously, today's user base of Letterbox skews international, and loves their auteurs.

🍿 Passionless Moments (1983), 10 tiny vignettes about the secret life of random thoughts. An early short from Kiwi director Jane Campion. [*Female Director*]

🍿

2 tobacco-related movies:

🍿 The Stolen Jools (1931) which crams cameos by no less than 55 then-stars into a 20 minutes mystery plot. Everybody from Gary Cooper and Our Gang, to Irene Dunne and Maurice Chevalier. It was a charity project to raise funds for a Tuberculosis Sanitarium - sponsored by Chesterfield cigarettes!

🍿 Thank you for smoking had some cute opening credits. Nepo-baby Jason Reitman made some excellent movies later ('Juno', 'Up in the air', 'Tully'), but not in this, his first feature. Produced by Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, this libertarian black comedy was unwatchable. JK Simmons played the exact same role he did in 'Burn after reading', and Robert Duval had a moment, but Aaron Eckhart cannot act, and the satire didn't work. 1/10.

Fun fact: Not one single cigarette was smoked in this movie about cigarettes.

🍿

I’ve disliked Netflix for many years now, and try to avoid anything that starts with the dreaded "N" logo. Last week, when writing about ‘Hit Man’, I coined the phrase ‘Netflix chum’. [Hat tip to Roy Scheider.] Here is my definition for it: “Brainless, artless, empty-calories and algorithm-driven dreck. Surface-sleek, fast-edited dogshit for the broadest lower denominators. Movies that are soul-sucking dead inside. They make you hate yourself for wasting your life in front of the screen. The reason why you cancelled your membership years ago.”

Case in point, the new Netflix action caper Trigger warning. I was lured in by the “Indonesian female director's first thriller in English”. But then, everything about this production was worse than lame: The script, story and acting were bad. The emotional core was fake. Action was awful. Score: 1/10. [*Female Director*]

🍿

Throw-back to the Adora Art project:  

Adora on her bicycles.

🍿  

(My complete movie list is here).

[olderthannetfic]

@marzipanandminutiae mentioned at least one canon that totally was catnip for fanworks fandom.

Wynonna Earp's big ship starts with Waverly getting beer all over herself and getting caught in her shirt. Deputy Hotass Haught helps her with it and Waverly is all "Ahaha. This would be super awkward if you were a man..." as Nicole oggles her.

I absolutely shipped it. I just didn't get back into the show after first season and so never talked about it much on here. I made a pimp vid of all the different things I shipped on that show after S1 to try to get other fans into it, but that was about the extent of my participation. Dolls was my favorite though, so that soured the show for me later.

I'm not usually into canon pairings, which is tricky because a lot of the really good stuff for female characters is canon f/f ships, often ones with a very different vibe from the m/m that gets big in fandom and that I tend to prefer.

What I appreciated about the setup at the beginning of Wynonna Earp is that one of them was all "I'm straight! OH NO!" in a more comedic than self-hating way. (Catnip!) The other one leered at her and gave off horny vibes. (Catnip!) Both actresses were super hot to me, which is just about never true on TV. And it's an urban fantasy trash show full of stupid monster of the week shit and other things I like, not a prestige drama that I'll never care about fanfic of because the canon writing is what I'm drawn to.

Would I have written f/f fic for it if I'd stuck around? Hard to say. My output is pretty minimal at the best of times. I might have been satisfied with canon. I'd probably have read some fic and made a couple more vids.

(At 6k+, that ship is in the top 250 or so on AO3 if you go by tag search. It's just not top for new works in 2023. Only half of them are otp:true, but that's still more fic for this ship than most fandoms have total.)

My big exception to not liking canon ships is that I like a fair amount of BL, indie "m/m romance", etc. I've pondered why that is, and I think it's a number of specific vibe things that I find regularly there. There's a disconnect where this stuff isn't literal representation by and for the same group. Even when the author is possibly a cis man, there's still that assumed audience. In the ones I like, the ships often have a fucked up element even if the ending is happy. Some of them are goofy comedy and it's comedy that works for me, which is always so subjective. I recently finally got around to Scum Villain, and I loved the meta shit and humor, but it was really LBH being such an obsessed little creep that sold me on it. Clueless senior + stalkertastic junior is my catnip.

When I've tried indie f/f fiction, it has often been extremely serious, featured rather blandly wholesome ships, and put lesbian identity front and center. But checking or not checking those tickyboxes isn't the issue: it's a vibe thing. I was looking forward to Gideon the Ninth since it sounded a lot more interesting and messy, but I ended up getting distracted before it came out. (This happens often. I still haven't seen KinnPorsche on the m/m side of things. If I find out about it too long before release, I often never end up getting the canon.)

The most recent queer female character I can remember making me go "Ooh!" is the protagonist of Knife+Heart. She's a violent creep and a total mess, and the movie is a bloody art film horror nobody saw outside of film festivals. It's about a lesbian director of m/m porno movies in the 70s trying to track down a serial killer who is preying on her actors. There is constant meta in her increasingly artsy porn films and in the narrative overall. There are 57 layers of identity bullshit going on at all times, but none of them are just about orientation qua orientation. They're about the closet and violence and parents and fans and voyeurs and projection. I don't know if I'm really rooting for Anne to get back with her ex. She's so terrible and the ex deserves better. But it's apparently possible to write a lesbian character I am all over... if you're a dude who makes gay art films.

--

Of course, just asking for f/f that is exactly like the m/m I enjoy is silly. I'm always going to have slightly different standards for what bugs me in a sex scene or what hits to close to home and all of that.

What I want is f/f that makes me feel like the m/m I enjoy does.

And I've virtually never found that. I've found canon m/m and f/f Western live action media that I like and that give me similar feelings, and I'll vid those ships but not usually write them. I have not found female buddy or enemy relationships with the subtext I like that would inspire me to write fic. Well... Xena. If it were on now and I were watching it for the first time now, Xena would probably inspire me like this.

--

This started with people finding an older post where I spent months hand-compiling shipping stats for FFN and Wattpad to show how het they are and coming away with the idea that m/m is the problem.

And I'm not saying it was TERFy because it was a stupid response. I'm saying it was radfemmy in that I got reblogs from open radfems who had worse shit to say than "fandom hates women" within one or two reblogs down that chain. There's a certain "It is the duty of all queer women to support the movement by ___" vibe that pops up constantly on posts like these. Whether you agree that the subtext is there, it attracts accounts with blatant radfem stuff in their headers and then a wave of nonsense hits my inbox. That's just the practical reality.

https://www.tumblr.com/olderthannetfic/746553097204203521/the-fandom-hates-women-response-to-lack-of-ff

The "fandom hates women" part of it comes from the fact that fandom as an entity just doesn't watch the kind of media that draws femslash, even if it ticks all of the boxes of things those very same people say they like. There are so many times I've watched a show that I've seen mega-popular Tumblr posts wishing existed, and then the fandom is so, so small comparatively and often in general. There have been superheroes, vampire/supernatural shows, fantasy shows, movies, books, the list goes on, that feel like they were generated out of Tumblr's desires for ideal fandom media, and everyone knows they're never going to attract anywhere near the same attention for fandom and fanworks because the common denominator just tends to be that if there isn't a full ensemble of attractive men to ship either with each other or with the women, fandom's not interested.

So it's not about prioritizing women in that sense, it's about people witnessing hypocrisy over and over again the second a show doesn't have a mostly-male ensemble. The people who are in these fandoms are frustrated that good faith attempts to get people interested are met with every excuse in the book that all eventually boils down to "I don't like watching stuff with women in it as much as I like watching stuff with men in it." And if that's how people feel about it... sometimes the conclusions are going to turn into the more uncharitable take of "fandom hates women."

--

Maybe, but whenever I see a "fandom hates women" reblog of my stuff, one or two reblogs further down the chain I get an overt TERF. I just had to go block several people today, in fact.

The first person to reblog with a comment like that is usually subtle, but their friends and friends of friends are not. The rhetoric that very quickly starts is the fandom equivalent of that "All the butches are becoming trans men! We're losing lesbians!" stuff.

Here's the thing: I've been in ten billion fandoms that were so awesome and fit fandom's supposed tastes to a T and yet no amount of promoting them could get anyone to try the canon. This goes for canons that are all men or all white men or all majority ethnicity men or whatever else.

The default state of media is to not engender a big fic fandom.

I agree that the rare outliers mostly follow certain patterns, but we extrapolate too far when we say that a lack of those patterns is why a fandom is small.

A fandom is small because that's the near-universal default.

--

Yes, a small slice of fandom consists of guilt-ridden queer fujoshi who say they want more f/f but don't make much of a move to make that happen. I tend to run into that a lot because of my own tastes and having friends who share those tastes.

Far more of fandom is people talking generally about how representation matters without saying they would personally join these fandoms if they existed.

Neither group is large enough to be the real reason some woman-heavy canon fails to take off to HP levels.

The real reason is not hypocrisy but the fact that most things don't take off like that. Most things without massive, massive audiences especially don't take off like that. And the very few things that do are flukes and don't actually predict that another similar thing will take off in the future.

--

Go to AO3's tag search. Search for all canonical fandom tags. Sort by uses and descending order.

Right now, I get 64,390 tags.

The first page, 50 tags, goes from HP with 497,845 works to the Thor movies with 59,266 works. By page 6, we're below 10 thousand works.

By the end of page 10, we're down to Labyrinth with 3,906.

Somewhere in the top 500 AO3 fandom tags (many of which are just franchise metatags for each other), we go all the way from megafandoms to medium size and down to relatively modest ones.

That's not a lot of room for a big f/f-heavy fandom given the trends in mainstream media and that mainstream media is where most really big fandoms come from.

--

I also notice that you're conflating a lack of desire to watch something that's primarily about women with a lack of desire to watch something that includes women.

There are tons of fans who want something more like The Mummy with a leading man and leading woman they love.

Granted, that's not me and that's not a lot of my fujoshi/slasher audience, but it's extraordinarily common. I know plenty of people who don't like canons that are only dudes, but since they also don't like canons that are only ladies and they don't ship f/f, this gets spun into "fandom hates women".

--

Let me be clear:

Conflating "lesbians" and "women" is a radfem position.

[skullsandwineglasses]

The Rebel Princess Episodes 56-57 Thoughts (SPOILERS)

So I’ve been responding to some comments on MDL about the raw episodes, and so I thought that I’d share my thoughts here too. I already did so in this post, but here they are again, but this time with some poorly made screenshots haha.

So in episode 56, we see Helan Zhen gift Awu the field of flowers. In this scene, Awu asks if Helan Zhen actually saw Xiao Qi die with his own eyes. He doesn’t directly say so, but he’s adamant that Xiao Qi is dead, which in turn makes Awu even more adamant and hopeful that Xiao Qi is still alive. At the end of the conversation, this is what she says about Helan Zhen’s gift:

“I like the ocean of flowers in front of me”

“I like the mountains, water, and grasslands here”

“But I won’t accept your gift”

In other words, she tells HZ that she does like his gift, BUT won’t accept it. IMO,  I think what she means is that she likes what the gift reminds her of and what it represents (i.e., XQ's earlier promise to take her to explore the grasslands beyond), but she won't accept it from HZ. She’s describing a general affection for the land, because this is the land that Xiao Qi loves. It’s connected to him. But that's just me reading deeper into what she's saying and trying to match her words to her stoic and slightly wistful expression. That's why I think she looks melancholy because being here on the grasslands (plus seeing Ah Li Ma again) reminds her of when she first fell in love with XQ in episode 13.

In episode 57, we see Helan Zhen gift her the wedding robe. 

Basically, he says that he promises that he won't force her to do anything when they get married, but that he just wants to give her the title of being his princess consort to protect her. 

But she says that she doesn't need a title, 

“I don’t need another title/identity”

she already has one: she's Xiao Qi's princess consort. He asks why she won't let go of a dead person who's never going to come back, when he's right here and willing to protect her. She promptly shuts him down by saying that even if Xiao Qi were dead, she'd never be his bride. Before he leaves he asks her if she ever had any feelings for him, even if just a little. She says she never. She says that every moment she spends with him is torment.

“to me [every moment with you] is torment”

The last two words “jian ao” directly translates to torment. 

If you just watched these scenes without knowing or listening to the dialogue, it would seem as though Awu is going soft and is starting to have feelings for Helan Zhen (like maybe some kind of Stockholm Syndrome thing is happening), but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Awu’s expressions are pretty neutral and hard to read, so I can see how some people can have that misconception. And while I do wish that Awu would openly show more hate and disgust towards HZ, Awu has never really been an outwardly hateful or vengeful character. She’s always been calm and collected, much like Xiao Qi.

Admittedly, she does seem a little resigned, but her words are strong and firm. I guess it might be because she’s so done with HZ’s obsessiveness and just couldn’t be bothered to raise her temper at him. He’s not worth the energy. It’s clear that he isn’t giving up any time soon. And in a way, by saying these hurtful words so coldly and calmly, it cuts deeper. It shows she’s sure and confident in her feelings (or lack thereof) towards him. She won’t be swayed. While if she were hysterical, it might actually give HZ hope that he could change her. 

Anyway, while we didn’t get to see Awu and Xiao Qi together in these episodes, we were still able to seem them reaffirm their love for each other in other ways: Awu with her F*ck you to HZ, and Xiao Qi with his determined rescue mission for his wife. 

[flyingbooks42]

ack i feel bad bc i was going to send you an ask for ffwf last week today but kept forgetting to do it until literally today. so i'm going to give more questions in one to make up for it

1: who is your absolute favorite character to write?

2: is there a character that you love so much but just struggle with writing them?

3: where do you write (google docs, word, directly into ao3, etc)? and where do you prefer to write (physical location, if any)?

4: description of the fic you are most hyped about writing please.

-- @lokigodofaces

No worries! I take ages to answer asks anyways.

1.Probably Loki

2.Most characters, to be honest. I don't really "get" characterization unless I've read a ton of meta about the character

3. Mostly google docs, though sometimes also notepad++ (a txt file editor, and I prefer to work on my desktop in general but I sometimes also work on my laptop especially if I'm away from home, just wherever I am.

4. I currently don't really have enough time or energy for writing fics, but there are two fics that are fairly frequently occupying my brain.

I've written 1-2k words of the first one. It's a queerplatonic Tesseroki fic where, after Loki drops off the Bifrost, instead of being found by Thanos, they die - but not really, since Space wants them to live and the other Infinity Stones help them retrieve Loki's soul and connect it to the Tesseract's. In this AU, the Tesseract was used as a power source and engine for a spaceship, and Space can only influence the way that it is used in subtle ways, so that the spaceship tends to trade hands between different groups of space patterns quite frequently (in the hope of there being someone who will realize that the Tesseract is a sapient being) and some think that it is haunted. Once Loki's soul is connected with Space's, they share the spaceship-body, and since the systems that control the Tesseract did not account for a second soul in there, Loki is able to more directly affect the world than Space. The fic'll be episodic, with a mostly-rotating crew of OC space pirates and some crossovers and probably encounters with other MCU characters. There's also a secret in it that I don't want to spoil and, though I don't know how obvious I made it, I want to see people's reactions when they figure it out.

The second one I haven't written any of but I have planned it out in my head, though it'll probably be quite a long time until I actually write it. It's a crossover between the Machineries of Empire series and the MCU where Asgard exists in the Machineries of Empire-universe and frequently wars with the Hexarchate. This all originated from me thinking that humanoid-voidmoth!Loki would be interesting (voidmoths are the Hexarchate's spaceships, and they're sentient) and then that Jedao/Loki would be a fascinating ship because they complement each other and have many of the same issues, so they could either make each other better or way, way worse (it'll mostly be in the "worse" category in the fic because 1. drama and 2. this is in the Hexarchate, but I'm aiming for a positive ending). In this AU, Kujen was working on humanoid voidmoths at around or before the time of Jedao's birth or before, and managed to make them humanoid and even age from infancy to adulthood like a human being but wouldn't yet get the hang of consciousness & memory transfer into a humanoid voidmoth body until the canon time period in which he did. Asgard found and attacked the one of his labs in which he was researching this, and Odin took a humanoid-voidmoth baby in order to hopefully figure out how the enemy's spaceships worked. Flash-forwards a while, and Loki is a prince and young general of Asgard who is brilliant at calendrical warfare, especially space battles. Asgard is mostly specialized in infantry battle, especially since by using the Bifrost's teleportation they bypass the need for spaceships when invading enemy territory, and they disdain space combat. During this period, Jedao and Loki interact with each other through battles where they're generals on opposing sides and they develop a respect for each other. Then, Hellspin Fortress happens and at some point after or before that, the rough equivalent of Thor 1 happens (Loki finds out that he's a voidmoth-not just born of the enemy but a tool of the enemy- and Thor is banished due to an impulsive & aggressive action and Loki makes bad decisions born of panic and self-hatred and at the end of the whole thing Loki falls into space (from a spaceship)). This is getting pretty long so I'll just leave it at that for now, but the fic has plenty more to it.

[qqueenofhades]

The photo set you reblogged of Yusuf and Niccolo helping throughout time just filled me with so many happy feels and it made me realize that it seems so common in media with immortal couples that they take breaks from each other and reconnect after a few decades. Which is a great trope but seeing these two that seems to have been attached at the hip since the day they met just fills me with all the heart eyes.

(I haven't read your fanfics for them yet. I know I'm a bad fan but if it helps I havent been able to read anything since all this started but while writing this ask I got the feeling that all this rambling I spewed out is a big theme)

Hush. Bad fan nothing. We all are coping with this stupid, awful year in different ways, some of us by escaping into fandom and some of us being unable to engage with it and some of us doing both or anything else. You certainly don’t owe me or anyone any obligation to interact with our content, fic or otherwise. So just to have that there on the top. You’re good, hun. :)

ANYWAY, thank you for giving me a chance to meta a bit on the boys and their relationship and to have a window into what my brain looks like pretty much 24/7 these days. (I blame them.) I keep thinking about all the ways this couple is depicted in the TOG film and how lovely it was and how unusual it is for me to have an OTP where I actually love them in canon and don’t need to violently disavow it in order to create AU fan content with just the characters. (See: Timeless, Game of Thrones, pretty much any show I’ve hyperfixated on at some point.) I love AUs anyway, because that’s the way my brain works, but the fact that I can also enjoy canon just as much is rare for me and for a lot of us. I saw a post somewhere remarking on how the fanfic for Joe/Nicky isn’t fixing anything, which is usually the point of transformative fanworks: we take something that canon atrociously fucked up and fix it. But in this case, all our interpretations are based on actually appreciating the way they’re presented in canon and wanting to enjoy that and uphold it, and that -- especially with a couple like this one -- is shocking??

Like. Despite my historian gripes about the occasionally incongruous details for their graphic-novel backstories (which are the only things I HAVE fixed in my fics), I’m just... deeply appreciative of the care which everyone, writers and actors and all else, put into depicting Joe and Nicky and their relationship. And god YES, one of the things I love the absolute MOST is that they’re a loving, faithful, committed, happy married queer couple over centuries, and that seems to be the case for as long as they’ve known each other/ever since they got together. (See Booker’s “you and Nicky always had each other.”) These fools can’t sleep apart from each other even when they’re stuck on a freight train in the middle of nowhere, they flirt like teenagers at dinnertime and even when they’re strapped to gurneys in a mad-scientist laboratory, they make out to enrage bad guys and also because they’re just still that goddamn into each other after all this time.

I think it was Marwan Kenzari who pointed out that there’s simply no way to truly state the depth of their knowledge and devotion and commitment to each other. They’re 950 years old. They have known each other since they were in their thirties; they’ve been husbands for literal centuries. There is no way anyone else in the world could possibly come close to replicating the kind of bond they have with each other, and neither of them have ever had any inclination to look, because why would they? Especially with the fact that queer couples in media, even otherwise sympathetically portrayed ones, often have Drama and Third Parties and Promiscuity and whatever else (because of the tiresome old canard that Gays Equal Hypersexualized!), and Joe and Nicky don’t need or want ANY of that. There’s no urge to make their relationship a cheap source of soap-opera conflict. It’s the rock and the center and the core of both of their lives, and everything they do stems from that.

There have been some great metas/comments on how neither Joe and Nicky are sexualized, they dress like stay-at-home dads during quarantine (Marwan Kenzari and Luca Marinelli are both objectively gorgeous men, and they’re out there looking like that, god bless), and the viewer is never invited to goggle at or fetishize their relationship. There are no leering or exploitative camera angles on anyone, and their expressions of love aren’t posed or intended to titillate the audience, they’re just solidly embodied and natural and lived in. It’s never bothered to be stated clunkily in dialogue that they’re a couple; we just see them exchanging looks and smiles in the early part of the film, and then we see them spooning on the train after the mission in Sudan, which confirms it.

At every turn, the narrative celebrates the kindness and love shared by the Immortal Family, the individual characters, and Joe and Nicky, especially and explicitly in queer form. The villains of the film are also defined by how they react negatively to that love. @viridianpanther​ had a great meta on how Keane as a villain is especially set up to menace Joe and Nicky as the narrative representation of toxic masculinity, aggressive heterosexuality, and the usual “Kill Your Gays” trope that we’ve all come to wearily expect. But instead, after that scene where Joe and Nicky fight Keane, Nicky is shot and comes back to life in Joe’s arms rather than dying permanently like we probably all momentarily expected, and then Joe gets to FUCKIN’ BREAK THE NECK of the guy who enacted that violence.... good GOD. The first time I watched it, I almost couldn’t believe it was happening. (This goes for the whole film, but especially that scene.) Like... when do we get that?? When do we EVER get that???

Obviously, there are so many stereotypes, whether visually or in behavior or character traits, that could have been assigned to a gay Italian character (excessively dramatic, effeminate, fashionable, etc) or a gay Arabic/Muslim character (explicitly announcing He’s Not Like Those Muslims, having to actively reject his heritage to make him more palatable to westerners, being tormented over being gay, etc) and Joe and Nicky subscribe to none of those. I get very emotional about Joe referring to Nicky as the moon when he is lost during the truck scene partly because it’s SUCH a common motif in Arabic love poetry. To call someone your “moon” is a beautiful way to say they’re the light of your life, and since the Islamic calendar is obviously lunar and the holidays, months, and observances, are set by the phases of the moon, this also has a deeper religious significance.

I don’t know for sure if they did that on purpose, but it it’s a lovely and subtle way of showing us how Joe clearly doesn’t have an issue with being both queer AND Muslim, and is able to draw on both facets of that identity in a way that a lesser narrative would have denied him. And that is just really wonderful. Yes, we’re seeing these characters when they’ve had centuries to settle into themselves, but there are plenty of writers who would have forced those conflicts artificially to the surface, rather than letting them be long in the past. It’s the same way when you watch a film set in the medieval era, it wants you to know that it Is Set In The Medieval Era. Cue the filth, misogyny, racism, violence, etc! Rather than it being a lived-in reality, it has to be jarringly drawn attention to, and I’m just so glad they didn’t do that with Joe and Nicky. And for them to have met in the crusades and fallen in love??! Come on. That’s just rude. Rude to me, personally.

Anyway, this was a rather long-winded and feelsy way of saying that these characters are constructed, acted, and written organically in such a way that you hate to even THINK of them being separated, and it’s not because they can’t function without each other, but because they are two halves of a whole. We also see that the characters themselves can’t stand being forced apart: Joe’s freakout in the truck scene when Nicky briefly won’t wake up, Nicky making sure to tell Joe that he’s glad he’s awake in the lab, the whole post-Keane fight scene that I talked about above, the way Nicky fights ferociously to get to Joe when Merrick’s stabbing him, etc. For that to be given to the queer couple, where the strength of their love and devotion is reinforced as one of the emotional goals of the story, and for that queer couple to be written in the way that Joe and Nicky are, both individually and as a unit, is just so very rare.

Because yes, there’s plenty of drama and angst and pain in their lives, but there’s none at all in their relationship, and that’s what fans keep telling TV writers the whole time: they WANT to see the couple confront things as a unit, rather than being kept on tenterhooks the whole time and forced to go through manufactured or artificial drama. It would feel especially wrong for Joe and Nicky, who have known and loved each other for 900 years. The fact that their respective actors also put so much care and love into them is very obvious, and makes me feel even luckier that they’re played by people who clearly get them and honor them and know what they’re doing.

Basically: of course Joe and Nicky have been with each other the whole time, and of course we’re all drowning in feelings over it, and I feel very blessed that this ship exists, and I very much need the sequel ASAP. Thanks.

[curioussubjects]

Hello there ! Could I ask if you've ever written meta/analysis of the Dean and Jack dynamic ? What the writers intended with it and what it meant for the overall narrative (and if there's something other than the parenting) ? And if you haven't, could I ask what your thoughts are on it if you have any ? I kept thinking I knew what was going on but there are some conflicting thoughts and I'd love to hear your opinion on it

Hey, anon, sorry for taking a hot minute to get back to you; the notif went away and I forgot I had yet to answer your ask. 😅 

So, I wrote this piece of meta a long time ago about Jack and his need to be parented, which you might find interesting. A lot of my opinions on Jack's role in the story hinges on parent-child bond he has with the rest of TFW. Relatedly, Jack is also the catalyst that allows Sam, Dean, and Cas to work through their own traumas and baggage. Jack is ostensibly a mirror in which TFW can see themselves as they guide Jack and, simultaneously, guide themselves. Moreover, from the start Jack's presence is a rehash of the Mary-John-Dean-Sam drama, but with Cas-Dean-Sam-Jack as players instead -- and this rehashing, of course, is meant to signal the break of cyclical trauma. Ideally, the burdens put onto Sam and Dean as children would not be put onto Jack. Sadly, that aspect of the story didn't quite pan out in the show for whatever reason (ahem). 

Departing from a strictly familial/parental relationship, Jack is the harbinger of a new world, a new state of being and existence. That was the first role for Jack we had, when he was conceptually introduced in season 12. This particular role, Jack actually fully fulfils by acknowledging that God is in all things (or should be, anyway) -- not as a diffuse power source, but present in all that is living. -- as well as breaking down the walls of heaven. The heaven Jack creates is the true destiny of humanity: a place where souls can be at peace and exert their full creative potential. So, yes, this aspect does come to be by the finale, although not as elegantly as it could have been were it not for covid and network meddling.

I know my answer is more broad than strictly Dean and Jack, but I think it still applies. That said, if you’re asking specifically about how Dean and Jack’s relationship was left after Unity, all I have to say is that Dean’s storyline wasn’t completed. We never actually got narrative closure between Dean and Jack (much like we didn’t get closure between Dean and Cas). 

[diversetolkien]

Hey! I just wanted to say thanks again for this blog and for your metas. I haven't followed you for long, and you've already opened my eyes on aspects of racism in Tolkien's works that I had not noticed, for instance the way Eol is coded - very negatively - as a man of color. I was wondering if you've written on casting in the Silmarillion and how you would like to see it cast if it were ever adapted?

(this became more about sexism, so I apologize for that. I do want to explain that I do talk about themes of sexual assault, so tw!)

Hey there! Sorry for taking ages to respond to this! I haven’t really compiled a list of what I’d want to see, but I have talked about it in various posts.

In general, I would want to see a balance of characters of color and white characters in both the villain and hero groups.  Mainly I would want to see characters of color in larger roles. I know for the Amazon series people are already being casted.

But hypothetically, if we were to do a Silmarillion series, I would love to see certain actors portrayed as character of color. And like, important people. And I feel like if these people were portrayed as people as color it would combat a lot of the European colonialist vibes, and also it would be awesome if it could be re-written in a way that just overtly erased those.

I currently have an AU in my in mind in which Galadriel befriends a Silvan elf after Celebrian leaves for Valinor that kinda becomes a friend to her and they start exchanging cultures and what not. She doesn’t become a second daughter because Celebrian will always be Galadriel’s daughter, but she becomes an incredibly close friend. Also cultural exchange.

I feel like in order to reverse the coding with Eol and the Orcs, just make them white? And make all of the women coded to be women of color of differing ethnicities. Let Angel Coulby play a part, as like, Celebrian. Let Danai Gurira be Galadriel. Let Lupita be Idril.

And I want to emphasize the importance of dark skinned women playing these roles (yes, I included Angel Coulby, but let her be one of the few lighter skinned actresses).  

Just flip roles that would initially raise eyebrows if the were played by white women, just due to the racial context.

Also, I would totally be on board with them taking the ‘rapey’ aspect out of a lot of women’s narratives (mainly Aredhel and Celebrian), because no matter what race it’s written in, it’s just uncomfortable as a woman reading about women like that. And maybe that’s just me, but even in earlier drafts Tolkien had written something like that regarding Arien and Melkor, and I’m just not a fan of women being written like that.

Not to say it doesn’t happen (and it’s important to acknowledge that this does happen to women), but I say that it’s continuously replicated in work today. I mean, even Game of Thrones and Outlander and pretty much every other high fantasy or period drama you watch will deal with sexual assault of a woman of some sort.

I feel like going forward, any interpretation of Tolkien should do well not to replicate that, especially in the Silmarillion where women are already shelved. This is what people have been doing with the tale of Hades and Persephone. Acknowledging the historical context, but moving forward to allow a woman to exist without sexist writing.

So in summary, just make heroes that are typically white not white. Also, work to rewrite the narrative both in relation to sexism and in relation to racism. Maybe I will end up posting my own fancast later on!